Cornell University
Grids and Filters: Chopin’s Technologies of Concealment and Disclosure
In 1852, the exiled German composer, author, and pedagogue Johanna Kinkel heard Chopin’s piano music to herald the “emancipation of quarter tones” by “rattling the gate” that both barred and disclosed “Nature’s eternal sounds.” Condemned to “slink reluctantly by way of semitones,” Chopin’s melodies “grope for finer spiritual nuances than current intentions can realize.” Kinkel’s dissatisfaction was framed as both symptom and diagnosis of the piano’s crude temperamental partitions, but its ramifications extend further, infiltrating the foundations of the keyboard’s digital epistemology. Like their paving-stone counterparts, the cracks between the piano’s keys present ludomusical obstacles, successful navigation of which entails simultaneously acknowledging and circumventing them. As Adolf Weissmann noted in 1926, “the obstacles [the piano] put into the way of the fingers’ capacity to grip and the hand’s span” served only to intensify “the performer’s ambition to inspirit this machine.” At Chopin’s bidding, moreover, “the machine was endowed with a soul and made eloquent by a unique personality. . . . For the first time, the keyed machinery was redeemed."
From Kinkel’s day to our own, images of Chopin at the keyboard have consistently mediated Romantic fantasies that at once admit and deny the mechanisms that bring them to spiritual life. The ensoulment of the piano was made audible by the very digital modes it purported to transcend. On the one hand, the piano “seemed to yield its secrets with comparative readiness,” as Weissmann put it; on the other, it stubbornly resisted the efforts of all but “the exceptionally gifted” to bring its music to life. Drawing on work by Katherine Hirt, Julia Kursell, J. Q. Davies, Bernhard Siegert, Laura Otis, and Stefan Andriopoulos, this paper approaches the interfaces of Chopin’s pianos in terms of the compliance and resistance they engendered. Moving between the discursive registers of pedagogy, physiology, philosophy, and cultural techniques, it pursues Weissmann’s implication that rather than constituting a transparent means by which Chopin and those who followed in his fingerprints could assert their musical will, such compliance was conducive to mechanized automatism; conversely, the creative spirit was spurred rather than hindered by mechanical resistance.
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Roger Moseley focuses on intersections between the musical disciplines of history, theory, and performance. His interests range from the music of Brahms, on which he wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, to music-based video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and from eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation to technologies of musical (re)production. Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 2010, Moseley lectured in music history and theory at the University of Chicago. From 2004-2007 he was a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, and in 2007 he was awarded an MMus with Distinction in Collaborative Piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. At Cornell, he teaches undergraduate courses in music history and theory, and recently held a graduate seminar on virtuosity in nineteenth-century music.